Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

100 Chapter 4. An analysis of aoristic and imperfective aspectis modelled in underspecification formalisms like the Constraint Language forLambda Structures (Egg, Koller, and Niehren 2001, Egg 2005) or UnderspecifiedDiscourse Representation Theory (Reyle 1993, Reyle, Rossdeutscher, andKamp 2007), which are designed to give a more principled account of ambiguityand reinterpretation. I leave it to future research to implement my accountin such a formalism.Let’s instead turn to imperfective aspect, which imposes no aspectual classrestrictions on its argument.4.7 Imperfective and coercion: the habitualinterpretationIn section 4.5 we have seen that with aoristic aspect, the Duration Principleguides the choice for a specific coercion operator from the set of permissibleoperators. Coercion is triggered by a mismatch in aspectual class. Imperfectiveaspect, on the other hand, does not impose aspectual class restrictions. Itcombines happily with bounded as well as unbounded predicates. Nevertheless,the Duration Principle plays a role with imperfective aspect too, although adifferent one: it triggers coercions by its own. In this section I will argue thatthis is how the habitual interpretation comes about. Note the similarity withthe functions of the Duration Principle in English (section 3.3.3): there, too,the Duration Principle can guide independently motivated coercion and triggerits own coercions.We have seen in section 4.3 that imperfective aspect indicates that thetime of the eventuality includes the topic time and that this semantics directlyyields the interpretation that the eventuality is going on, the processualinterpretation. If the topic time is longer than the time associated with thepredicate, however, a literal, that is, processual, interpretation is not available.The mismatch in duration can then be solved by the intervention of a coercionoperator that lengthens the time associated with the predicate. This is exactlywhat a habitual operator does: the time of a habit of a certain kind is longerthan the time of single occurrences of eventualities of this kind. Figure 4.10serves to illustrate this.topic timeeventuality time before reinterpretationeventuality time after reinterpretation❄ HAB Figure 4.10: Habitual reinterpretationLike ingressivity, habituality is a complex issue and I provisionally proposethe operator HAB as defined in (126):